While still a teenager, Patrick Leigh Fermor made his way across Europe, as recounted in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. During World War II, he fought with local partisans against the Nazi occupiers of Crete. But in A Time to Keep Silence, Leigh Fermor writes about a more inward journey, describing his several sojourns in some of Europe's oldest and most venerable monasteries. He stays at the Abbey of St. Wandrille, a great repository of art and learning; at Solesmes, famous for its revival of Gregorian chant; and at the deeply...

The first extensive collection of letters written by war hero and travel writing legend Patrick Leigh Fermor.

The letters in this volume span seventy years, from February 1940 to January 2010. The first was written ten days before Patrick Leigh Fermor's twenty-fifth birthday, when he was an officer cadet, hoping for a commission in the Irish Guards. He had hurried back to England from Romania in September 1939, expecting to die within weeks of being sent into action, like his friend who was a junior officer in the First World War. The last two were written on the same day, when...